What was she trying to say?
I quit chewing and swallowed hard, focusing on her.
“If I hadn’t pushed you to spend more time with your father, this probably wouldn’t have happened,” she said, soft and sad. She felt guilty.
Did my mother really believe that any of this was her fault? That was ridiculous. Instinctively, I rose from my chair and went over to her, rubbing her shoulder. She shouldn’t have had the faintest suspicion that she was to blame. It was nobody’s fault but Player’s, the son of a bitch who had created the damned game in the first place.
“Mom,” I began coaxingly, but she just shook her head and put her face in her hands, letting out the sob that she’d been holding back for far too long. I hugged her close and stroked her hair because I understood what she was going through. It couldn’t have been easy trying to look strong so I didn’t break down. It was inevitable that she would end up pushing down a pain that needed to come out.
“Everything’s fine. I’m right here,” I whispered. Sobs shook her shoulders and made her breath hitch. I tried to soothe her, and when she collapsed back down in her chair, I sat on her lap and held her. I was too big to perch on her like that, but neither of us seemed to care.
I wiped tears from her cheeks with my thumbs, and she smiled at me and touched my forehead, right where my new scar was.
“You are everything to me. No matter how big you get, you will always be my little one,” she said gently, and I gave her another squeeze.
***
After we finished lunch, I set myself to washing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. Mom almost shooed me back to my room to rest, but I didn’tfeel like going back to bed, and my head didn’t even hurt, so I took the opportunity to wrap up the kitchen chores and unpack.
It took a few hours to hang up my clothes and clean up the kitchen until it was sparkling. After I finished, I took a hot bath and fixed my hair, which I did need to get cut. I had no idea why I wore it so long because the ends knotted so easily and I was always getting tangles. Then I went down to the living room, where my mother was sitting at the table, working on her glass painting. She was hunched forward slightly, focused on painting tiny flowers on a wine glass. She had all the necessary supplies spread out next to her: paints, rubbing alcohol, clean rags, and brushes of various types.
I’d never known much about art, but my mother was really good at it. She’d mastered three different techniques, each one more complex than the last. Painting was one of the few passions she cultivated in her downtime when she wasn’t teaching at the university.
I lingered to admire her work. I always liked watching her freehand decorate any glass object we had in the house. She especially favored flowers and landscape scenes.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, her eyes locked on her design.
“Pretty good now.”
Almost two weeks had passed since my crash and I was slowly getting back to normal.
“I’m glad to hear that,” she answered. She generally wasn’t very talkative and tended to get sucked in whenever she was busy with her hobbies. Painting on glass in particular required not just creativity and talent but, above all else, a great deal of precision. So I decided not to distract her anymore and took a seat on the sofa.
I pulled my phone out of my sweatshirt pocket and scrolled through my messages. I’d heard from Alyssa and Logan but nothing from Neil. And I’d been doing nothing except checking my phone like a dummy in the hopes that he might deign to give me a call or even send a simple“How are you?”I knew he knew that I’d been discharged because my father had definitely told the whole family, but Neil was probably more interested in getting down with one of his blonds.
He’d already forgotten me.
Sure, it had probably all been a lie, just a delusion that we’d had together, but still…
Still, I’d felt tangled up in him. Especially the last time we were together.
The burning way he’d look at me as he moved inside me. The little masculine sighs he’d let out next to my ear. The way he bit his lower lip when he looked down below to where we were joined. How his shoulders and back muscles went rigid as my fingers glided over his smooth skin. How I drove him wild with the lightest of touches.
And then there was what he’d done.
His uncontrolled—uncontrollable—orgasm. The way he’d exploded inside me, shaking my whole body, jettisoning the self-control he always tried so hard to maintain. He’d closed his eyes and fused his body with mine. Soundless, not even a moan, just like usual. All he gave me was a singular sigh of pleasure, low and masculine. The sound traversed my spine and dispersed throughout me as I basked in the kind of intimacy that I’d never known before—the kind he had never shared with anyone else either.
Maybe he’d gotten a taste for it now, after it happened once. Maybe he’d even do the same thing with that bitch Jennifer or God knows who else. But, despite all of that, his first time would still belong to me. Forever.
Foreverours.
I tossed my phone down on the couch and sighed.
It was useless to keep waiting around for him to get in touch with me, and I would force myself not to give in. I would force myself to quit looking for a sign because he didn’t deserve that.
I wondered what happened after I left. I felt a definite distance in his words and even in the tone of his voice, which was sensual as ever but cold, devoid of all expression.
How could he be so indifferent?
